The Girl Who Planted Trees
by jennyel
Summary: Cartoonverse - another "how BJ and Lydia met" fic. The Deetzes move to Peaceful Pines in search of relaxation and a quieter life; but when Lydia experiments with the supernatural, she doesn't quite get what she bargained for... More to come soon!
1. Chapter 1

**Chapter One**

She sat cross-legged in the centre of the room, hunched over an upturned vase.

_Okay, so I've got five minutes. Maybe ten, tops._

Shorn of its furniture, the room looked so big and empty. Along the walls, where the dresser and the wardrobe had been, the wallpaper was a different shade, a milky resonance like an afterimage. Light slanted in through the streaked window. She'd looked out over this street-scene - SUVs and Station Wagons nestling in garages, scarlet fire hydrants, Jerry Kipowski's trike upturned in a storm drain - her entire life, and this would be the last time she'd look down upon it.

Once, a long time ago, she'd helped her mother plant a tree out front. The tree was now a puny sapling, strapped for protection to a wooden pole, wilting already.

_I've just got to recite it exactly. No pauses, no mistakes. That's all._

Other than the vase, the only other thing left in the room was a dusty copy of _Praktical Magick _at her side. The book's cover was spoiled, rather unromantically, with a large _NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY _stamp - well, the library wasn't going to get it back. She felt a little guilty about that; but on the ticket inside the first page, she saw she was the first person to borrow it since November 1954. Twice in 35 years. New York would cope without it.

She double-checked a passage - closed her eyes and recited it. Satisfied, she cleared her throat.

_This is it. Last chance._

"Though I know I should be wary- still I venture someplace scary-"

That sounded right. Now the tricky part:

"Ghostly hauntings, undead heartbeats..."

"Julia Deetz! Julia Deetz! JULIA DEETZ!"

Something crashed beneath her, a terrific noise that punched into the world with such violence she was suddenly that little girl again, the girl who'd planted trees. She screeched with fright and rolled herself instinctively into a ball. _OMYGOSH OMYGOSH..._

_**"**_"Pumpkin!" A parental voice, but not the one she'd expected to hear. "Are you ready? Will you come and help me pick up all these plates? And don't forget to close the bathroom window!"

She lifted her head and inspected the room. No great flashes of light. No smoke or sulphur. No ectoplasm. Jerry Kipowski was back on his trike, whooping as he careered towards his next accident. Mrs Kipowksi was there, as glamorous as ever, bawling at Jerry to watch out before he brained himself. Jerry, having never known the absence of that nagging advice, bawled back and took it for granted.

She closed the book - it slammed with a heavy thud - and picked it up. She kicked the vase into a corner of the room.

"Coming, father!"

Her father, a man with financial means greater than his physical means, had hired a firm of sarcastic, semi-reliable removal men from Queens to deal with the bulk of their stuff - the Three Stooges had probably already wisecracked their way halfway to Boston or Castle Rock or flip knows where by now. What they'd left - the small, valuable stuff - Charles Deetz had packed up for the car, and mostly made a mess of. They say moving house is one of the most stressful things a person can do: the truth of this was etched into Charles's face.

He knelt over the broken china, fitting pieces together (they made a horrible, skin-itching scrape) and muttering about a tube of superglue that was now missing in action somewhere in New England.

"Hey, Lydia," he said, "you don't happen to know if Delia ever keeps track of her plates, do you? I mean, she can't know exactly how many she's-" He looked up now, at Lydia. "Say, that's an, umm, _very interesting _outfit you're sporting there, pumpkin."

"Do you like it? I made it myself!" She stuck her arms out so the red poncho could fan across her body. "Do you like the spiderweb pattern?"

Charles was scooping up pieces of broken plate and dumping them into the box from which they'd spilled. He frowned.

"It's lovely, pumpkin ! Just a little, well, _rudimentary_." He was floundering for a valid-but-inoffensive criticism. Lydia felt a fair amount of sympathy, but also a certain determination. "What if you want to climb a tree," he grabbed at, "or ride a bike?"

"It's okay, father," she said sweetly, "I don't want to do any of those things."

He'd sprung this move on her and, no matter how guilty she felt, she didn't want to cede anything else today.

"This is a chance for you to meet new people today, new friends!" he said brightly. "Remember what we talked about? You can play Goth later on, as soon as we're settled, but for now maybe it'd be sweeter if you changed into one of those dresses I bought you."

_Poor father_, she thought. She didn't like to do this, but she knew instinctively that this wouldn't be anything like the last battle they'd have. She needed this foothold.

"You know what Delia says," she said, feeling like some kind of ratfink, feeling already like she'd have to make this up to her father soon. "She says it's good to encourage my creativity."

She didn't like to use Delia as leverage - but it was true. Creativity - such a usefully vague term - was the closest Lydia and her stepmother came to a bond. It was Delia, surprisingly, who'd taken Lydia shopping in the macabre little shops in the East Village (she'd hated every minute, blatantly, but Lydia felt that meant she deserved a little grudging respect); Delia who'd allowed her to experiment with eye-shadow and mascara. It wasn't an entirely frictionless setup they had - Lydia was running out of blank compliments to pay to Delia's bizarre sculptures, and Delia's constant offers of an afternoon in the tanning salon ("you look so _pale_, dear, the other children at school must wonder what your parents are doing to you!") were becoming a little irksome, but somewhere in their intersecting circles there was a Venn-like island of common ground. And Lydia realised, with a calculation she was dimly horrified to discover she possessed, that she had considerable leeway over Delia.

Charles took the box and stumbled to his feet. His cheeks were pink with effort. He'd conceded. "Well, OK," he said weakly. "Will you go and fetch Percy? And if you see Delia, tell her we're going now."

"Ok, father. No problem."

Delia was in the garden, fussing around a shrubbery she was reluctant to leave unattended (she'd been over that morning to see the Carlins next door, to drop off a bucket of plantfood and elaborate instructions for proper shrubcare). She waved at Lydia and pointed at _Prakital Magick._ "Is that another one of your Stephen Kings, dear? I do hope you won't read the gory parts out loud again - you know how nervous your father gets when he'd driving."

"Not quite," Lydia said. "I wouldn't do that again."

"That's nice, dear."

Lydia stepped forward and took hold of a shrub leaf. It felt slick and greasy in her palm. This was, in all probably, the first time she'd ever touched this shrubbery, probably the first time she'd ever even considered it, but she felt with a sudden wave of sickly nostalgia that she was going to miss it sorely. "This book, it's for... an experiment. It's a magick book. Magick with a _k_."

"Sounds _fascinating_, dear."

This was one of those little things that Delia did. If she wasn't listening to you, she'd say whatever you were saying was _nice_. If she could hear you but didn't really want to, it was _fascinating._

"Dad says the car's ready now."

Delia gave the shrubbery a quick, heartfelt embrace. "OK, dear," she said. "Oh, I'm so glad we're going, honey, I have to tell you. The pipework always rattled, it was always _so cold _in the kitchen, and there was such a draught! I'm not sad to leave this house."

A cloud passed over the roof, dulling the twinkle of light that played across the slate. _Well, _Lydia thought,_ I never knew my parents had a skylight in their bedroom. Wonder what things I won't get to find out about this place._

Delia's expression fell into one of dumb, sad confusion. She'd realised her insensitivity.

"Oh, Lydia, darling, I'm sorry. I know-"

Lydia smiled her thin, wan smile. "It's OK," she said. "Don't feel bad. I know you didn't mean anything by it. Death? It's no biggy."

Delia approached, uncertainly, maybe to pat Lydia on the back, or hug her, or have a _girls' talk_. Lydia could cope with death but she wasn't sure she could cope with that. Mercifully, Delia vanished indoors as Charles sounded the horn, and Lydia was allowed a minute alone in the house.

She wandered through the empty shell of the house, pulling her poncho tight around her body and trying to remember something, anything. On TV, when characters walked around empty buildings at the end of a series, those memories would rush forward in booming voiceover and grainy special-effect: she believed in TV much less than she believed in magick, but it was still a disappointment when nothing came. An empty shell the house remained. If something had happened at the incantation, any kind of hint or slight movement, she'd have found a way to stay here, for as long as necessary. She'd have chained herself to the pipework if need be. But there was nothing but open blank spaces and a smug kind of silence.

Lydia stood in the open doorway. The cloud had passed over and the sun was out again. Her father beckoned her from the driver's seat. Delia fixed her makeup in the rear-view mirror.

One last look at the hallway, up the stairs, which lead to a window. The sun shone through, brilliant and blinding, burning its way over from the heavens.

"Goodbye, mom," Lydia said, and closed the door.


	2. Chapter 2

_Preamble: OK, I'm getting the hang of FF again, so now I know how to stick in a little preamble, which I really should have done in the first part. This is a fic based on the cartoon, but I've taken a few liberties with backstory and whatnot. Hope you all enjoy it._

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><p><strong>Chapter Two<strong>

"Mr Beetlejuice? You can go through now."

Man, were waiting rooms hell . . . well, purgatory if you wanted to be exact. The only good thing about doing business at Neitherworld City Hall was that the waiting room was always full of greenhorns who were hardly cold. Some of the ways people found to die! Beetlejuice had managed to con himself towards the front of the queue, by confusing some genius with scorched eyebrows and a charred burger-flipper (he'd tried to make his barbeque cook faster by adding a little petrol; everyone went hungry that day). He'd been slapped, scratched, bitten and threatened, but that was okay. He put all his paperwork together - there was so much of it, crumpled, dog-eared, chewed, coated in slime, defiled all over by his wonky primitive handwriting - and strutted forward.

"Thanks doll," he said to the receptionist. "You're a real fallen angel. It's showtime!"

He found Mr Sconehead's office, and was pleased to see he recognised the guy. Why, they'd chewed the cud (literally in BJ's case - if you prepared it right it had a nice beetley flavour) in that very waiting room.

"Hey buddy!" BJ said. "Someone died and made you boss, huh? Glad to see you're getting ahead."

Mr Sconehead's expression was hard to gauge - his head was shrunken to roughly the size of a fist, a brown and leathery little relic protuding ridiculously from his wide, properly-sized shoulders, little more than a tight little mouth and a pair of comical eyes, wide open and shocked.

"And let's be honest," BJ continued with a wink, "you sure needed a new one."

"That's very funny, Mr Beetlejuice," Sconehead said, in a simpering little voice that contained absolutely no traces of laughter, "but this is all business. I'll be processing your application for a haunting. I think you'll find I'm firm but fair, and I plan to judge your application solely on its merits."

BJ knew this guy would do everything he could to make death as difficult as possible.

"That's good to hear, Sconehead. Real nice. You don't strike me as the small-minded type."

This was going to be a long meeting.

The Neitherworld had changed recently, and in Beetlejuice's opinion not for the better. The logic was, as far as he understood, that the living hated red tape and admin because life was too short for endless forms and counterforms: in the afterlife, that wasn't a problem. Haunting had become a strictly regulated business - exorcisms were on the rise, to the point where the Neitherworld's administrators were more spooked than the living. Health and safety, privacy policies, child and data protection: you weren't even allowed to reveal yourself to your victims any more - you had to keep your identity a secret unless they asked you over the threshold. It was no longer a case of throwing on a sheet and finding a spinster to terrorise.

"Now, Mr Beetlejuice, I see you were unhappy with the outcome of a previous application. Would you like to tell me about that?"

"I sure would. Did you _see _that first place they tried to lay on me? A little shack in the Appalachians. Said they get a few hunters staying there a few times a year. Jeez, what am I gonna do with that? Frighten a few hicks? Let me ask you somethin', Sconehead. You ever been to a country wedding up there? Jeez, the things those hicks _do_, in every sense of the word, they're not gonna scare easy - I don't think they got the brains to scare easy. I can't help but feel my talents would be kinda wasted out there, you dig?"

Sconehead's eyes rolled uneasily around his silly little head.

"Now, Mr Beetlejuice, I _understand_ your concerns" - his tone suggested not only a lack of understanding, but also a stubborn rejection of even trying to understand - "but as you know, we make our decisions based on suitability and finding a good match. Can I ask you, what are your primary reasons for making an application at this time?"

The applications board was very keen on hearing a ghost's exact reason for wanting to haunt. Again, things had become overcomplicated, to the extent that haunting for the hell of it was no longer a decent option. You could still haunt for malice or mischief, sure, but you were expected to articulate that. Even so, the board were hungry for positive publicity. There was a case of a blues musician who'd been sent to haunt an old lady down in Georgia. The lady had been a well-respected scat singer in the inter-war years, and the board felt she and the bluesman would make a good match. Indeed, they'd gotten on so well they'd recorded an album of old standards, and were currently trying to interest the record labels. (It wasn't going well; even the label that had put out Elvis's post-death house records were dubious.)

BJ cleared his throat and pocketed his phlegm. "Well, Chuck, it's pretty simple. I'm freakin _wasted_ out here, buddy. I got a skeleton and a giant spider for company. Don't get me wrong, I got nothing against Jacques or Ginger, they're swell guys, but they're hardly my ideal audience. How am I meant to work with this? I'm the Ghost with the most, if I do say so myself. I gotta think _big__**. **_Surely you can sympathise with that, buddy, given your current, ah, condition?"

"Very well," Sconehead said. He gave out a weary little sigh. As much as he'd have greatly enjoyed wasting Beetlejuice's time here and dicking him about (having that kind of power was the only thing about this job that came close to being a perk), he had a backlog of applications to get through, and the constant drip-drip-drip of jokes was giving him a headache. Better to just send this jerk on his way. He went through the mess on his desk and found the memo marked urgent. "We might just have another opening for you . . ."


	3. Chapter 3

_Okay, here's chapter 3, followed in quick succession by chapters 4 and 5. As you'll see, I've taken a few plot-point liberties, especially with "Frinkelstein."_

_Hope you enjoy!_

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><p><strong>Chapter Three<strong>

Lydia came in through the back door and tried to slip unseen to her room. She was halfway up the creaking stairs when Delia, with the practised suddenness of an axe murder, broke cover and popped her head out of a doorway in the hall.

"Ly-di-aaaa! Oh, and don't you look _adorable!"_

_She's doing this on purpose now, _Lydia thought. She felt anything but adorable. The only thing remotely good she could say about her school uniform was that it was dark - it had an austere dignity, unlike the cute pink fluff Delia would have enjoyed dressing her in. But it itched, and didn't quite fit properly, and made clear to everyone in Peaceful Pines that she was a student at the snooty girls-only school.

"Hey Delia. Where's father?"

"I told him to go for a lie down, dear." Delia's expression hardened. Her tone became matronly, stern but sincere. "You know he gets so worked up about things."

That was true, and Lydia did appreciate there being another woman in the house to worry about that. Whenever Delia was bugging her by whistling, or playing old disco records, or - _yuck! - _sniffling into a tissue in front of some true-romance television pukeathon, Lydia would tell herself that.

"He hears a few water pipes creaking," Delia said, "and that's only natural in such an old house as this, you know - sometimes in the dorms at Bryn Mawr it'd sound like the band was marching right above your head - and he starts getting ideas. He's an awful one for that. Sometimes we've been in be- umm, we've been watching TV, and he'd swear there were things going bump in the night."

"That's crazy," Lydia said. She knew what those bumps were: most probably her, creeping downstairs at night to watch the late-night horror movies. She had to keep the volume down low, so the only way to hear the screams was to sit right up in front of the television set. You got a better look at all the gore that way, so it was worth it.

"Well, dear," Delia said brightly, "don't you worry about your father, he's tucked up with a hot toddy and the funny pages. Tell me about school."

"It's . . . okay," Lydia said. She tried going up to her room but Delia, like the serial killer who just won't quit, followed on the stairs.

"Just okay, dear? You've been there a week, you must have more to say than that. Are you enjoying it?"

"It's pretty good," Lydia said.

She wasn't.

"You must have made _lots _of nice new friends now."

"Yeah, I guess so. All the girls are pretty cool."

She hadn't.

In fact, she'd done particularly badly with the other girls. Peaceful Pines was wealthy, but it was still a small provincial town. The parents - doctors and lawyers and businessmen - may have treated their daughters to regular trips into Hartford and New York, to get headstarts on whittling down those trust funds, but they were still raising small-town children. Those girls weren't ready for a goth to sit herself down amongst them. One of those girls, a blondie by the name of Claire, had spoken out during Lydia's show-and-tell presentation on worms. At the presentation's beginning, Lydia had noticed Claire (everyone noticed Claire; it was just easier that way) looking like a dog being shown a card trick: she had her pretty little doll's head bobbed to one side, and an expression of deep, uncomfortable thought on her face. She was clearly grappling with something serious. Near the end of the presentation - Lydia already knew she'd lost the room at least five minutes before - Claire sat upright and said, "Err, Miss Shannon, isn't this school meant to be for girls and not, like, _ghouls?_" Miss Shannon rebuked her half-heartedly but for the rest of the day Claire wore a glow of achievement that shone through the rouge on her cheeks. _Well done_, Lydia thought, _it took you half the day to work out that "ghoul" sounds a little bit like "girl". _Claire's father was apparently some kind of big-shot investment banker. Clearly, the apple - pumped up, teased and tousled with all kinds of insecticides and chemicals, contorted in every direction so that it looked lovely but was in fact utterly, utterly repellant - had fallen a long way from the tree.

Delia wouldn't quit. She walked behind Lydia across the landing, wanting names for these new friends. She was wondering out loud what their parents did, and whether or not they'd look too keen if she invited all of Lydia's little pals around for a party.

Lydia got to her bedroom door. "I'm sorry, Delia," she said, "I've got a load of homework I need to do. I really want to get it out of the way." She didn't, and she felt guilty, but she wanted to be alone after another crappy day and, well, it was about time homework did something for _her_.

"Oh, of course dear," Delia said. "What is it? Anything I can help with? I'm _so _bad at Math I don't think I could do much for you, but I loved Spanish. Si, me encanto las Espanyol!"

"Thanks," Lydia said, "I'll let you know." She closed her door.

Well, it was kinda nice that Delia was making an effort. But, just as her attempts at networking in the Manhattan art world had proved (there was one prominent critic, a regular contributor to the New Yorker, who'd unexpectedly relocated to a burg in Minnesota to write movie reviews for the local paper just weeks after giving Delia his home phone number at a gallery opening), she didn't believe in the concept of trying too hard.

One cool thing about Lydia's room was that she had a phone hooked up. She'd have preferred a TV, but her father had read some horrorstory about the stunted emotional development of children who had unfettered access to television: basically, as Lydia well knew, he was worried she'd stay up to watch the late-night horror movie. But a phone was pretty useful. She took a notepad from her bedside cabinet - the front and back covers were festooned with doodles of spiders' webs and sharp-toothed skeletons - and looked up a few phone numbers. She'd recently pencilled the New York dial code as a prefix, so she wouldn't forget and harass anyone in the locality.

Amber Zamora was busy: her mother explained she was at the movies, watching Onion Terror 5 (for the sixth time). Kate Murphy was busy: she was spending the weekend at her dad's place up in Boston. Stephanie Hangeland was busy: she and Tina Salcido had gone to some mall somewhere. Lydia left a message and asked her friends' parents if they would get their daughters to call back, but she already knew they probably wouldn't. She couldn't feel too angry at them. When Lucy Hodgson had moved to Canada everyone, including Lydia, had promised tearfully to stay in touch, to call every single night and write every single day. But after a day or two, that had petered out. Not out of any malice, but simply because Lucy was gone, and wasn't coming back. So you moved on.

Of course, it was easier to move on when there were four of you rather than just one.

The late movie that night was Frinkelstein. Lydia always managed to wake up at roughly the right time anyway, but she was helped greatly by those old pipes. They were really banging away up there in the dark sinus of the attic, stomping about like a pair of old boots one minute, whooping and jeering the next. Then, when the pipes finally settled down, a shelf in her father's room collapsed. It was a cold night - the temperature had plummeted dramatically after a pleasant day - and Lydia pulled the bedsheets tight around herself and listened to Delia patiently rebuking Charles, partly for stubbornly trying DIY when he could have easily hired a man, partly for being so jittery.

When Charles and Delia settled, Lydia crept downstairs in the dark. She was still confused by the layout of the new house, and nearly fell over a pile of chintz that Delia had liberated from a sitting room and was planning to set into the wild at the nearest dump.

About a year earlier, she'd had her appendix removed. The night after the operation, she got up to use the bathroom and through her haze of painkillers managed to wander lost for about five minutes. That had been a long, long five minutes. It was the first night - save for slumber parties with her friends - that she'd spent away from her dad, and that had been a peculiar feeling, like the world had opened up massively. She hadn't a clue where she was going. It hadn't been a frightening experience at all; rather, one that demonstrated for the first time the big world's supreme indifference. There had been no malice or threat, just a sense that her existence was irrelevant to her surroundings. The pain in her gut, the cold on her shoulders - not even a scratch on the surface of the world. Stopping at a window, she saw New York laid out before her in streetlight and velvet contour, like all the brightest stars had fallen to Earth. She wondered how many lives were illuminated beneath those lights; she also wondered if anyone was looking back at her. Eventually a nurse found Lydia sat cross-legged in the corridor and guided her to the toilet, then back to bed. The nurse was kind but businesslike. Lydia could tell from her ringed, bloodshot eyes, and the vat of coffee in her hand, how tired she was. The nurse, God love her, was just a substitute, and a poor one at that - there was no way this exhausted lady could give Lydia what she wanted.

The big gaudy TV that Charles had bought especially for the move was still giving Lydia problems. It had a remote control, but the remote had a mind of its own, and kept switching channels. The picture kept fading into rows of black and white bars: a man's goofy face was occasionally visible through the distortion. Eventually, Lydia got frustrated enough to give the TV a good hard whack with the remote, and that worked like a charm: the picture returned in perfect clarity and she had no further problems.

She usually loved Frinkelstein, and always thrilled at the carnage, but this time around she noticed something different about the movie. The monster (she hated when people called it Frinkelstein; Frinkelstein was the _scientist_, not the _monster_, sheesh) wasn't the main aggressor: the villagers decided he was a freak, and attacked him. Was he a freak? Well, kinda. But what's wrong with freaks? Still, it was a strange thing to notice, and it did spoil her enjoyment of the mayhem somewhat. She even found herself a little tearful at the end, when the panicky villagers killed the monster for no good reason. She put it down to tiredness.

Before bed, Lydia put her light on and examined herself in her mirror. Claire Brewster's ghoul comment came back to (and even at this lonely hour of the morning, Lydia couldn't help but giggle at the corniness of this pun) haunt her. She was pale, very pale. And that dark eye makeup didn't help. But what was wrong with that? Lydia liked the way she looked. She liked herself.

But then, she thought, people liked New Kids on the Block. They were wrong. But that was _millions _of people who were wrong. So it could happen.

_C'mon, Lydia, _she thought, _get a grip. Think nice thoughts . . . like bats and spiders and Frinkelstein's monster chasing Claire Brewster. _

She smiled at her reflection and only shock prevented her from screaming the entire town awake.

Her teeth were crooked and green.

She hurried to the bathroom and squeezed about a month's worth of toothpaste out onto her brush. When had this happened? She'd bought quite a bit of candy for the ride home from school, yeah, and her father had always warned her, but surely it couldn't happen so fast . . .

In the bathroom mirror, her teeth looked normal. They were straight, and the proper size, and they were, if anything, even whiter than her skin.

Yes, she was definitely tired tonight. Somewhere out in the blackened hallway, her father's snoring sounded a lot like laughter.


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter four**

Well, it was high time those jerks down at City Hall treated him with a little respect, but he was damned if it wasn't paying off now. (He was damned either way, technically, but he didn't care to get bogged down in details.)

Rural Connecticut! Sure, it wasn't the mean old city, which meant it was severely lacking in the mean old distractions BJ loved, but it was still a pretty sweet gig. Just went to show that one of those pencil-pushers had some sense; that someone in the paperwork dungeons had finally spotted his potential. This was major WASP territory, full of the semi-retired, the professionally pedantic, the mid-level Master of the Universe. Prime scaring estate. And there was money in it, too! This was the break he'd been waiting for.

He had the whole of Peaceful Pines to play in, but his main base was the old Maitland place on the edge of town. He'd seen the Maitlands before, shuffling through the waiting room with their heads down, and a little bird (it had once been a mineshift canary) had told him they'd been sent to an abandoned hospital in the Midwest. Tough break. You'd only get kids in there nowadays, kicking about during the school holidays, and kids as a rule were much tougher to scare these days. BJ was happy to have avoided that assignment: he hated kids. Couldn't stand them. No respect.

The house was a doozy. Plenty of floor space, great location, and a general gothic vibe that was very amenable to BJ's plans. He received a dossier on its new living occupants: two yuppies and a daughter. Classy. A less confident ghoul would have changed into a new suit for this, but not BJ. He was the Ghost with the Most to begin with, and, well, chicks always dug confidence.

He couldn't make direct contact, though. There wasn't much he _could_ do. Sconehead had clipped a novella of instructions to the Deetz file, along with a note cheerily informing BJ that sandworms found ghosts who couldn't follow simple rules to be especially succulent. It was a given, a rule as old as time, that ghosts could only reveal themselves on the rarest of occasions - that made sense even to BJ. The spirit world's greatest asset was its very implausibility in the living world - most living folk didn't believe in ghosts, despite several millenia of folk tales. You did get a few odd-jobs who made a living from the paranormal, like those dubious mediums (though BJ had made a deal with one or two of them in the past; shake a table or two, shout a few things through a paper cone, and if it's just shambolic enough it keeps the punters rolling in), or those jerks in New York who ran about wearing boiler suits and power packs, trashing hotels and pouring slime over each other. Most people, however, had no time for ghosts, and the Neitherworld had a strict policy of keeping things that way: if the truth became accepted the power of scaring would be lost, and those boiler suit guys would clean up, both financially and spiritually. So you couldn't reveal yourself to your victims unless they specifically summoned you and invited you in. That meant you mostly haunted by proxy, when the lights were out or in a room that nobody was in. You could manifest in the living world, but only for a short time - BJ likened this to lining up a shot in basketball. You got a few seconds to take your shot, and if you lingered too long you got penalised.

Beetlejuice had never been a fan of subtlety. Not for him the slow accumulation of dread, the sinister midnight whisper, the easily-missed movement in the shadows. That had always been his downfall when it came to haunting: no sooner had he found a decent place then he was in the form of a giant snake, or whatever else came to his mind, sending the poor marks running for their lives. It was just too damn funny. But he was aware of what a special opportunity he had in Peaceful Pines - but if he chased out the Deetzes, he could forget being summoned into the Outerworld. And then what? Then it was back to long winter nights in the Roadhouse, playing What's That Invertebrate? with Ginger. So, for possibly the first time in his death, BJ was playing it cool.

He'd soon worked out how to press the husband's buttons. Man, what a sap! The guy was scared of his own shadow - even before BJ had taken over his shadow and made it approach the poor sucker holding a knife. Even something as simple as juicing into the form of a whoopee cushion, and crying out whenever Deetz senior sat down in his lay-z-boy, worked every time. This was all fairly simple, low-grade haunting, but boy was it effective. Knock a shelf down; wait for Deetz to put it back up; knock it down again. Yeah, it was juvenile, but the guy fell for it every time. The only worry was giving the poor sucker a heart attack and having him cramp your style.

The wife had artistic pretensions. This was always good for a laugh: a few years back BJ had done a summer haunting internship at a gallery in Chicago (the Neitherworld board had pretensions of their own, don't you know). His Mona Beetsa was always a grin; his Scream was always a scream. And if somebody's camera went missing, they never suspected the statues. He was still experimenting with Wifey Deetz, but she seemed trickier than her husband - she was, well, kinda oblivious to everything. One time she was watering her plants and having a good old conversation, when an odd little weed with striking black-and-white petals - _Beetlescum Nastivae - _had called her a mad old windbag. She'd looked a little annoyed, sure, but like a dinner party guest who's just smelled a fart, her firm grasp of social etiquette kicked in as a self-preservation instinct, and she'd just laughed and continued the (one-sided) conversation. Her art was a more obvious point of attack, but man! BJ knew he was good, but even he couldn't make those funny little sculptures and psychotic painting much more horrific than they already were.

That just left the girl. He pictured her as some prim little missy, yucking it up half the year at lectures in some stiff liberal college somewhere, but one afternoon he'd poked his head around her room, and there were some promising signs. She was evidently some kind of morbid chick: her room was freak-chic, Munsters-meets-Madison-Avenue. A strange (and kinda annoying) sense of decorum stopped him from exploring too much, but he did find an interesting book beneath her bed, between a single abandoned plimsoll and a kooky spiderweb poncho. _Praktical Magick? _This yuppyette was into that kinda action? Well, wasn't that useful? All BJ had to do was find a way to make her say his name, and the show could really begin . . .


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter five**

If she hadn't grown so apathetic about her journal - and that in itself was worrying, because back in New York she'd have rather died than go a whole day without writing in it - Lydia would have detailed her weekend something like this:

Saturday was a washout. Her father went back to New York, for a client meeting and a ball game. (He had a spare ticket but Lydia, thinking he wouldn't want to take her to something as boyish as baseball, hadn't picked up on his hints; Charles, thinking she'd be bored witless and probably embarrassed half to death at the prospect of going somewhere in public with her dad, hadn't pushed his hints too far.)

Before he left, he took her to the video store to pick a film she and Delia could watch. Lydia was initially torn between _Space Monsters from Hell _and _The Devil from Mars_, but, when her father suggested she pick something Delia would enjoy too, she finally went for _Mid-Afternoon. _It looked from the cover like one of Delia's romantic nightmares - simpering girl glancing longingly towards generic Captain Jawline hunk - but the blurb on the back promised bloodshed, gore and vampires. Something for everyone. The good thing was, rental videos came in clear, blameless cases. Delia would never know.

A few hours later, Charles was squirming in his little bucketseat at the ballpark, barely able to watch. He calmed his nerves by thinking of his two favourite girls, finally bonding in front of his fancy, if occasionally malfunctioning television. (He'd called out two different repairmen, and neither could explain those funny black and white bars; incidentally,he'd also scoured the TV guides to see which show kept bleeding into transmissions - he'd concluded that ugly, weird guy with the thinning hair and goofy howl of a laugh was some kind of new chatshow jerkoff.)

And at that precise moment, the Deetz girls _were_ sat before the TV, but they weren't quite bonding. Lydia was genuinely enjoying herself for the first time in weeks, giggling and tossing mouthfuls of popcorn down her throat; Delia was cowering with her hands over her eyes.

"You can tell it's fake," Lydia said. "See there? Jugulars don't burst that way."

"Just tell me when the horrid part is over," Delia said.

"OK."

Three . . . two . . . one.

"It's over."

Well, _horrid_ is a relative term - and what was on the screen at that precise moment was not, in Lydia's expert opinion, as horrid as what had preceded it. To take the liberty of extrapolating Delia's view from a scream and a swoon it seemed that, in her less-learned but equally valid opinion, the movie was still plenty horrid.

So that was Saturday. Sunday was worse. In fact, Lydia spent the whole of Sunday in bed, through a simple lack of anything better to do. At about one in the afternoon she read a little Lovecraft, but the joy she'd felt the night before had disappated and not even Cthulu could make her smile. She sensed Delia wasn't talking to her, Delia who didn't come to check when Lydia didn't appear for breakfast, or lunch, and instead spent the afternoon in the garden, clipping away at hedgerows and reproaching timid straplings.

Lydia's mother had been a keen gardener. On Autumn Sundays, when the air had the crisp chill of Thanksgiving, Lydia and her mother would sometimes dig in the soil. Lydia was only little then, and she'd always squealed with joy in the garden, first upon finding a nice juicy worm or beetle; second upon carrying her new friends into the living room to proudly show her father, who always recoiled with a dread that both Lydia and her mom found hilarious.

Charles came back from New York at about six. He knocked at Lydia's door, bearing a plate.

"Pumpkin, have you eaten? I brought pizza."

Lydia appeared, looking like Morticia Addams in her long nightgown. She smiled, asked how the game went, and invited her father into her room.

Charles gulped. Night had fallen, and the room was illuminated only by the weak glow of Lydia's skull lamp. Her underwear drawer was open and a worryingly adult stocking hung limp over the edge, like a skeletal arm poking out of a crypt. The air was thick with strange feminine odours. He doubted he could even breath the air in a room like this: it was a different world, the realm of pubescent girls, a hostile, alien environment. He'd been so glad to leave that world behind at the end of his own teenage years, when he was going steady with Julia, but he noted dismally that he was about to go through it again, this time from another angle, equally distant and terrifying.

"I think I'm OK right here, pumpkin. I wouldn't like to intrude."

She was still reassuringly childish stood there, chewing greedily on a slice of pizza. This would be no sudden metamorphosis: she wouldn't wake up one morning, transformed into a giant beetle. There was no need to be so nervous!

"Delia tells me you two watched your movie last night," he said. "Quite an interesting choice, she told me."

"I picked something for both of us, father." Her eyes flickered with a certain mischief, a certain appeal to him. "There was some mushy stuff in there too. I thought she'd enjoy it."

"I think you knew she wouldn't. Look, I know you're going through this phase at the minute, honeybun, but you know, not everyone is into this blood and gore thing you've got going on. I know, I know, it's your creativity and all, but Delia is trying too. Maybe you could meet her halfway, yeah?"

Lydia felt a sudden spike in her emotions - just a phase? well, it's nice to know my personality is just a phase I'll be over soon enough - does he ever tell Delia her art is just a phase? - but it collapsed quickly. She didn't want to fall out with her father, or Delia. The world had opened right out again recently.

She nodded. "Okay, father."

"That's my pumpkin." Suddenly, anxiously, he put a hand on her shoulder, and immediately felt ridiculous: he was pleasantly surprised she didn't recoil in disgust at his touch. "You're happy, aren't you, Lydia?"

She laughed and rubbed her nose. Charles felt his poor old heart bend and whimper. "Of course I am," she said sweetly. "Why wouldn't I be?"

"Oh, just checking," Charles said. He took his hand off her shoulder and sighed. Then he brightened up again, and said, "You know what us fathers are like, always worrying, always fussing."

She laughed.

"But you would tell me if something was wrong, wouldn't you?" he said.

He hoped desperately she wouldn't interpret this as him wanting to know about, well, _girl's _problems. He was much too fragile for anything like that. He was paying enough for nice lady doctors and respected private schools - authorities with generally enlightened attitudes to this sort of thing - so that he could avoid this particular chat.

"Don't worry about me, daddy, I'm _fine_," she said. She rubbed her nose again and Charles was certain he could hear sad, sweet music trilling through his ribcage. "Thanks for the pizza, that was very nice of you. Love you."

"Love you too, pumpkin."

He stooped to kiss her goodnight (there was a time, not so long ago, that that particular manoeuvre required him to get down on one knee, like he were genuflecting to a princess; now it took barely a bend of the legs, an indifferent little flick of a gesture). After she'd gone, he stood dumbly at her door for a few minutes. He was in a milky stupor. Finally, he realised what was troubling him, what had stirred his poor old heart into action.

It was the rubbing of her nose. He knew where he'd seen it before. Lydia's mother used to do exactly that whenever she was lying.

...

"I'm just worried about her, Charles," Delia said. She uncorked the wine and smelled it - she had friends on Long Island who always smelled a fresh bottle of wine and could describe the fragrance in wonderful, elaborate language - she herself didn't know the first thing about wine, but it seemed like a vaguely sophisticated thing to do.

"Mmm-hmm." Charles reclined in his chair, relaxed a little by Delia's firm assertion that nothing funny had happened in the house while he'd been away - the television had worked perfectly, and the pipes had settled down.

Delia brought over her plate of salad (she'd read that pizza was on its way out; the lifestyle pages were confident it would head the way of macrobiotic cookery in the 90s) and settled down next to him. "I left her alone today, because I'm sure she doesn't want her stepmother always floating around, but I do worry. She really doesn't help herself with that Queen of Darkness shtick, poor thing."

"If that's what she wants to be," Charles said, "I guess that's just what she wants to be. It's her life."

"You know what girls are like, though, Charlie. When I was Lydia's I was just _obsessed _with the Beatles. If you didn't know how to find Penny Lane on a map of Liverpool, or that Ringo's real name was Robert, I wouldn't speak to you. Literally."

"Wasn't his name Richar-"

"Don't get me wrong, Charlie, I'm all for her self-expression. It's actually rather cute. I just think she'll make a pariah of herself by going for the doom and gloom. Teenage girls can be very cruel, especially if you stand out. And especially out here, where they won't be as . . . _enlightened _as we'd expect, coming from the city."

"We can't really interfere, though, Delia. What can we do?"

"It's okay," Delia said, draining her first glass of the evening. "I hate to see her moping like this. She's been _so sweet _about my art, I want to give her something back. I think I know what to do."


End file.
